The Woman Who Wouldn't Die

Sandy is covered in blood and mud, and a tangle of vines from the bog plugs the hole in her chest, and it is just like this, a creature half alive, that she rises from the muck at the Tri-Gas plant, on the Beeline Highway near Jupiter.

The place is so quiet, so damn deserted, a rescue seems impossible - but suddenly out of nowhere in the mist of the dawn, two early shift workers appear at the gate. Mike says, "Hey, fellas, call a tow truck, I'm stuck in the mud." But they're not stupid, so they call the sheriff, too.

And Sandy hangs on. Hangs on until the cops come, and the ambulance, and the Trauma Hawk. Hangs on until the hospital, where a detective leans low over her stretcher, and - safe at last, if you can call it that - she says in a voice surprisingly strong: Forget about two masked men. My husband did this. His name is Michael Anthony Jones.

There are 12 stab wounds in all, scattered like some sick connect-the-dots game across her stomach, her chest, her upper arms, her ears. Her hands are like mincemeat where she grabbed the butcher knife, and the fingers on her right hand flop around like a marionette's. The knife pierced her lung and her breath comes in jagged little spurts.

When Sandy asks the doctor if she will live, he looks a long time at her, bandaged like a mummy and lost in a jungle of plastic tubing, and very softly, he says, "Honey, you should have been dead 16 hours ago."

On Oct. 28, 1993, in Courtroom 315 of the Palm Beach County Courthouse, Mike Jones pleaded guilty to attempted first degree murder and false imprisonment.

The man who did the crime and then confessed to it made a speech:

"I have been searching myself, wondering why things happened the way it did.

"I am not a person of violence.

"I have got plenty of love in my heart."

He got eight years.

Afterward, Sandy wondered aloud if that was how long she had to live.

Sandy:

"After The Incident, I held up real good. I was in this support group for battered women, and I told them my whole story. People thought, `Oh, this girl is wonderful!' I was like a role model for people who were going to survive.

"And then, Michael plea bargained, and I just lost it. What happened was, I met with the prosecutor and she handed me the doctor's reports on Michael, which explained how upset he was about the abortion and me leaving for the women's shelter and taking the kids. The gist was that he was insane at the time he did this to me. So the idea was, we go to trial, he might get off by reason of insanity, and if we go for the plea, then at least we keep him in the system for his prison term, and then 15 years' probation. So I had 24 hours to decide, and I took the plea.

"And then, after Mike went to prison, I just broke down. I started hearing his voice in my head, and one day I flipped out on Lindsey. She was yelling at me about something, and I got it in my head she was her father. I put my hand over her mouth and nose and I didn't let go. Her eyes started fluttering, and then I came to and realized this was my daughter I was trying to kill.

"I wound up at St. Mary's. Three weeks of intense therapy. One hundred different medications. They couldn't tell me if I'd ever be well, but I took the medicine and I saw a therapist, and I just kept going.

"And then one day, at group, this old lady started talking about how her husband had thrown her against the wall and something in me just clicked. Because this woman reminded me of my grandmother, and here somebody was beating the hell out of her, and I just thought, `God, does it ever end?'

"Right then, I left the meeting, screaming, and I went to the water fountain. I had two bottles of pills with me, and I opened them up and I took them all. I just wanted it to be over, all the violence. I wanted out. Waking up in the hospital and realizing I hadn't been successful - that I hadn't killed myself - that was just the worst feeling in the world.

"And you know what?

"Here's the funny thing.

"This whole time, I'm doing the talk shows.

"Because right around this time, the Nicole Simpson case broke, and O.J. was the suspect, and suddenly domestic violence was this really hot topic.

"I went on Geraldo and Montel, and they said I had a real good story."

There is a name for Sandy's condition. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. She was propped up in a psychiatric ward when she got the diagnosis. Nightmares. Hallucinations. Anxiety attacks. Depression. Flashbacks. Panic. Numbness. It all fit.

Most people think of the post-trauma illness as a wartime affliction, but it can be triggered by any traumatic event: rape, torture, child abuse, a hurricane, a flood. Or, as too many women can testify, near-death at the hands of the men they married.

But when Sandy got the diagnosis, she thought the wartime explanation might be the best, after all. Hadn't she just been through a war? Wasn't the Beeline her battlefield?

Roy Anderson, who has 20 years' experience as a case manager at the 45th Street Mental Health Center in West Palm Beach, tried to help Sandy put the fragments of her life together in 1994, when she was living in a part of town where drug shootings are not just something you read about. He remembers how smart she seemed - and how scared.

Of what had happened.

Of what might.

Sure, Mike Jones had an eight-year sentence - but that was just on paper. In real life, he would be out before her youngest baby finished kindergarten. Then what would she do?

"Sandy was having visual terrors of being stabbed," Anderson says. "In layman's terms, she was having flashbacks. She was absolutely terrified. When something like this happens, if you don't get help, you wind up like the Vietnam vet who disappears into the mountains and fights the war for the rest of his life."

It is an irreconcilable misery to be married to the man who almost killed you, and so, while Mike Jones was in jail awaiting trial, Sandy did the only logical thing. Divorced him.

By this time, she had found somebody else. You might even say Mike Jones introduced them.

It was a few months before The Incident, and Mike had just dropped off Sandy at her job with an answering service in Riviera Beach, where she worked triple shifts to pay their rent. In the parking lot, they fought. She was still sniffling when she sat down at her desk - with a black eye - and the first call came in. Something about a leaky sink. Please beep Jerry Manning.

When Jerry called back, Sandy tried to deliver the leaky-sink message, but she was sobbing too hard.

Jerry had a soft, deep voice.

"What's wrong, ma'am?"

So she told him. The whole unbearable story.

"Ohmigod, honey," he said, "you sound like a real nice lady. You got to get out."

They met for the first time three months later, after the   Trauma Hawk deposited Sandy's ravaged body at St. Mary's. When she opened her eyes after surgery, she saw Jerry, standing over her bed with a teddy bear, no longer just a soft-deep voice on the phone.

Sandy thought getting married and buying a sweet little house together and setting up shop as a blended family, his kids, hers, might help her start over in life, but she was mistaken.

It was 1996 when they said their vows - and not too much later when they broke up.

Jerry Manning tried, but he stepped into a crowded marriage.

Jerry. Sandy. And her monster.

It is high noon on a beautiful autumn day in 1997, and Sandy has just washed her hair and put on a pretty gray shorts set for an emergency meeting with the principal and teachers at her children's elementary school.

The emergency is, her ex-husband is about to go free.

Mike Jones' travels through the prison system were entirely typical - up to a point. He served 321 days in the county jail, followed by three years in prison, and then, because Florida's prisons were crowded and one way to empty them was to let inmates out early, he was all set to walk out of his prison digs up near the Georgia line - a bus ticket south tucked in his pocket - when there was a hitch.

He had no place to go.

No job.

No plan.

The people in charge of monitoring his 15-year probationary term didn't want him landing on Sandy's doorstep - in a letter to a judge, a Department of Corrections administrator noted that Sandy was "in extreme fear for her life and the safety of her children" - so they took the unusual step of having him assigned to a probation and restitution center in Central Florida for a year.

Now, the year is up.

Sandy plops down in the principal's office. Fiddles with her purse straps.

"What if he tries to take the kids?" she asks.

The principal raises her eyebrows.

"What if he disguises himself?"

The principal jots a note.

"What if he has a gun?"

It's not just her children's physical safety Sandy worries about. Lately her kids have been doing well in school, but Sandy remembers what happened this time last year, when Mike's prison term expired, before the judge sent him to the probation center: Mikey stopped focusing on his schoolwork and started obsessing about the safety of his family. A worried old man at the age of 6.

"I'm afraid for my mom," he told his teacher then, and looking into his small, round face, she knew right away his mom wasn't the only one he was scared for.

The principal pulls up her chair, touches Sandy's arm.

The school, she says, will do everything it can to make sure her kids are safe. And she and the teachers will get them extra counseling.

Sandy smiles. But under the table, her knees are shaking.

Nobody says it, but everybody's thinking it:

What about Sandy? Who's helping Sandy?